Judge says BU can’t turn over infringers’ IPs in P2P case

A federal judge has quashed a subpoena from the music industry, which for more …

The music industry's requests for more personal information regarding the identity of several accused file-sharers have been shot down by a federal judge. Judge Nancy Gertner quashed a subpoena this week in the infamous London-Sire v. Does 1-4 case, saying that the IP addresses of three anonymous Boston University students could not be handed over because the university had "adequately demonstrated that it is not able to identify the alleged infringers with a reasonable degree of technical certainty."

The legal system has been chipping away at the London-Sire case all year, starting this spring when Judge Gertner said that making files available on a P2P network does not equal copyright infringement. At that time, she also noted that IP addresses can't always be traced to a particular individual and that, if Boston University were compelled to turn over a list of possible infringers, it could give a green light to RIAA fishing expeditions.

That apparently didn't stop the RIAA from continuing to pursue the IP addresses of suspected infringers. It filed new subpoenas, seeking to identify several of the students in question—in this case, Does number 8, 9, and 14. But Gertner is standing by her original opinion on the matter. "[T]he Court finds that compliance with the subpoena as to the IP addresses represented by these Defendants would expose innocent parties to intrusive discovery," she wrote in her motion to quash. "Accordingly, under the test laid out in its 3/31/08 Order, the Court declines to authorize discovery and quashes the subpoena as to Does # 8, 9, and 14."

Boston University appears to have been able to hold off the RIAA and its cronies for now, but not all universities have had the same luck when it comes to accusations of copyright infringement. A couple of schools, such as the University of Washington and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have simply refused the RIAA's requests to pass on infringement notices to students, usually by arguing that IP addresses aren't always attached to a single user and therefore they cannot be sure of who was using them at any given time. Others, however, have have seen the courts find this argument unpersuasive. Marshall University was ordered by a judge this April to cough up the IP addresses of seven John Doe students, despite the fact that the university said (once again) that the IP addresses was not likely be linked to a single student.

These lawsuits are certainly far from over—the question of what, exactly, needs to happen on a P2P network in order to show infringement isn't a settled issue. But this case shows that at least some justices take the privacy of college students seriously.